There is a lot of nonsense floating around about the racial makeup of US Chicanos. Obviously, they are mixed-race people, being made up of a mixture of Indian and White, mostly from Spain, but to a lesser extent from other European nations such as France.

According to a report I accessed in the Journal of Physical Anthropology in the 1990’s, a study done on US Mexican-Americans (probably citizens, but I am not sure), mostly done in border cities, concluded that taking the whole group on average, US Mexican-Americans are:

68% White
30% Indian
2% Black

That is on average. Obviously, there are groups, including the openly racist White elite, who are much more, if not entirely White. There are others who are all or almost all Indian. And there are Black and Mulatto Mexicans.

According to the report, most of the inbreeding between Whites and Indians occurred soon after the conquest. The White conquerors had not brought enough women over here, so they made do with Indian women for wives.

There was less White-Indian interbreeding after early in the conquest, as a race-based system was set into place, with Whites being at the top, and pure Indians being at the bottom. In recent years, there has probably been very little White-Indian mixing.

In the intervening times, Mestizos of various shades bred in with each other, but Whites bred less with Mestizos as time wore on. Mestizos did not breed in a lot with Indians (although there was some of this), and only a little with the Whites, once again, lessening as time wore on.

Early on, some Black slaves were brought to “wonderful, non-racist” Mexico. They mostly settled on the Atlantic Coast. There was some limited interbreeding with Blacks and Mestizos and Blacks and Indians, such that your average Chicano now has a tiny amount of Black blood, much as he may not wish to believe that.

Keep in mind that as late as the late 1700’s, there was still quite a bit of interbreeding going on, including White-Indian, White-Mestizo, Indian-Mestizo and Indian-Black or Mulatto. At this time, there was still a shortage of White women in some parts of Mexico, which explains some of this. Plus, the system now is much more racist now than it was back then.

The reason I am even bothering to write this post is because of two breeds of ignoramuses: racist anti-immigrant activists, and equally racist Chicano nationalist fools.

Both of these groups have claimed recently in web posts that present-day Mexican immigrants to the US are “80% Indian”.

The radical Chicanos say this out of, frankly, their contempt for European Whites and European culture itself, and their fetishization of their own Indian ancestry (in particular, Aztec ancestry, although many Mexican Mestizos and Indians are not Aztecs. Here is a link to a radical Chicano site offering so-called scholarly evidence that, apparently, Mexicans are 80% Indian.

I say apparently because the piece is so poorly written (though the author is fairly intelligent) that it is hard to figure out what she is trying to say. She cites genetic studies done in Mexico that apparently show that Mexicans are 80% Indian and only 20% White. She quotes other studies done in the border states of the US that apparently show that US Chicanos are 62% Indian.

As you can see by the JPA study above, the JPA study totally contradicts these figures.

The racist Whites, including White Nationalists, say this because they view Indians as inferior to Whites, and they have a hard time swallowing the notion that the average Mexican is a mostly-White person like he is. I made a comment noting this on the Steve Sailor blog, but the comment was not accepted by the moderator for unknown reasons.

Now, I really don’t care if Mexicans are 80% Indian or not, but it is just not true. Although it pains both groups to believe this, your average Chicano is a mostly-White person with considerable Indian blood.

To this day, despite all the screams of La Raza propagandists about the wonders of Mexico, that country, and most of Latin America for that matter, is a profoundly racist place, much more racist than the US that the La Raza crowd continually condemns as racist.

Their own beloved Mexico is far more vicious and cruel in its treatment of illegal immigrants than the US they shower abuse on. Indeed, US treatment of illegal immigrants is comparatively mild. They are only housed for a brief time in detention centers, then they are deported. If I were to go to any nation on Earth illegally, the vast majority of places would treat me just as poorly, and in many cases worse.

The Aztlan Crowd needs to be confronted and exposed. Studies show that 63% of all Mexicans in Mexico believe that the part of the US known as “Aztlan” is actually a part of Mexico. Presumably, many believe that they have a right to take it back. Indeed, Mexico’s elite, including its intellectual class, is quite open on this subject.

More research needs to be done regarding how US Hispanics, legal and illegal, feel about this. How many of them believe Aztlan is really a part of Mexico? If they believe this, what do they think should be done about it? How strong are their feelings?

My own limited experience has been that the only Mexicans who call Whites “pilgrims” and talk about Aztlan, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Reconquista (Mexico taking back Aztlan in some way or another) have been college educated US Chicano intellectuals.

One guy was a typical egghead Leftist working on a Master’s Degree in History. Another was a professor of Spanish at a university who only came to the US when he was 26 years old. Of all the Mexicans and Chicanos I have met in the US, those are the only ones who ever brought up these subjects. There is a possibility that the average Mexican or Chicano in the US could pretty much care less about these issues.

We also need to try to gauge what causes Mexicans/Chicanos to adopt radical Aztlan-type causes. Does anti-immigrant sentiment increase the drift towards radicalism, slow it down, or have no effect? What can we do to keep our Mexicans/Chicanos from becoming radicalized in this way?

If the Aztlan movement is indeed an eventual threat to the territorial integrity of the US, this is something that most Americans should know about.

The Mexican War was wrong, but we won, and Mexico signed a treaty giving up the land. It was perfectly legal to conquer land by force back in those days. Limits need to be imposed in irredentism, otherwise every border on Earth will become a war zone.

The Aztlan crowd, for those who do not know, believe that all of California, Nevada, Arizona and Texas and parts of New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming are actually part of Mexico, not the US. These are the lands the US conquered from Mexico in the Mexican War back in 1848. The Mexican government signed a treaty and handed over the lands.

The radical Aztlan activists, including the largest US Hispanic student organization, MECHA, subscribe to this view that much of the Western US is actually a part of Mexico.

Unless and until MECHA and the radical Chicanos renounce their view that a part of the US is actually part of a foreign country (a frankly treasonous view), sensible progressives need to distance themselves from this nonsense and expose these folks’ treasonous alliance with a hostile foreign state to the American public.

There are some even more dangerous idiots in the Mexica Movement who call the entire Americas the land of Anahuac, a land that only Native Americans have a right to live in, and which all non-Indians, or possibly only Whites, have to go back to where they came from. As far as Blacks and other non-Whites who came to America, the movement is unclear (see below) on what needs to be done with them.

That is, all Whites (whatever that means) have to go back to Europe. As I said, the movement is confused on US Blacks, so we get radical Latino morons confronting Black anti-illegal immigration activists with, “Go back to Africa!” The same boneheads greet White anti-immigration activists with, “Go back to Europe!”

They also tend to call Whites “pilgrim” – that is an easy way to spot a Chicano nationalist. Because of their stupid belief that almost all Mexicans are “80% Indian” (destroyed above), the Anahuac fools say that all Mexicans get to stay in Anahuac while all the rest of us take off.

Despite its claims to be a pan-Indian movement, the Anahuac idiots are obviously almost all radical Mexican-American Chicano nationalists – a look at their webpage makes that clear. I believe that they have made little inroads with US Native Americans, and apparently few to none with other Latin American Indians.

It is interesting and insulting to other Indians the way that they have decided to name the entire area of the indigenous Americas Anahuac in reference to the Aztec name for the Valley of Mexico. This is simply a radical ethnocentric Chicano racist movement posing as and conflating itself into a pan-American Indianist movement.

Although the potential for serious violence and instability in this movement is apparently low for the time being, one of the dangers of permitting millions upon millions of Mexicans to anarchically flood into the US is the possibility of increased virulence and numbers of these irredentist crazies.

In about 100 years, though I will be dead, there is a potential for a serious problem from these folks due to increased numbers if nothing else. There may be some sporadic violence or worse from them in the interim, and the prospect of race riots by agitated Chicanos over immigration is a real worry even this early on, though little has materialized so far.

The La Raza crowd and the radical Chicanos had every right to scream about racism and discrimination against Hispanics back when the movement was founded in the 1960’s. Once they took it into ethnic nationalism, as with Black nationalism, it had the predictable racist and fascist effect that infects most all ethnic nationalism.

Obsession with La Raza, Aztlan, MECHA and Chicano nationalists have been the province of the Right, while the Left, incredibly and possibly unknowingly, has gone along with the open treason of these characters. That is disgusting. This is not a Left-Right issue.

Most progressive and Marxist regimes in the past century have not tolerated secessionists well, rightly or wrongly.

China did not tolerate Tibetan, Taiwanese or East Turkestan secessionists. The USSR crushed the Chechens. The Socialists in France and Spain did not allow the Catalans, Basques, Corsicans or Bretons to secede. Certainly no leftwing regime allowed a neighboring state to lob off a hunk of the homeland, as the Chicano nationalists are outrageously proposing.

We need not let the Right own this issue, and we need to stop accusing the Right of hysteria on the Aztlan issue (although they are sometimes guilty of it). Although there is little immediate concern, there is a potential for difficulties down the road.

New citizens should be quizzed on their allegiance to the nation before being granted citizenship, much as Muslims are being quizzed about their tolerance for Western openness before they immigrate to Europe. Perhaps Mexicans looking to become US citizens (a step we should promote) should, in the same vein, be quizzed on their opinions regarding the territorial integrity of the US, including the parts known as Aztlan.

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18 responses to “The Racial Makeup of US Chicanos”

Good information, and I for one really like to talk about race, and the race factor in America as well as around the rest of the world,

I read about the percentages of races within races, though thats no surprise, however, where does all of these races come from? we can see that they are mixed with one another, though how did the pure bloods arrive, before there was any mixing at all, the very first blood of the races?

surely white people didn’t come from black people as it has being suggested, and black people couldn’t have evolved from white people,

all others are questionable, but I choose these two because, they are the extreme colors, white and black, all other races are in between,

Hey Jaz, as you can see, I really love to talk about race too, in the US and around the world! I think it’s a great subject. However, here in the US, you can’t talk about race at all, except to say, “Evil Whites are racist scum and persecute Blacks and Browns…” or something along those lines. Outside of that, the whole conversation is just shut down.

Yes indeed, Whites did come from Blacks! Out of Africa maybe 45,000 years ago. Back then, Whites were dark too. White skin only goes back about 9000 years ago to Northern Europe.

The Amerindians came in here in waves starting maybe 14,000 years ago, coming from NE Asia around Mongolia, China and Russia.

The Polynesians and Micronesians came out of Taiwan a few thousand years ago and mixed in with Melanesians.

Melanesians go back forever, like 35,000 years.

Asians started in Northern Vietnam 53,000 years ago and split into NE Asians, SE Asians and Japanese-Korean types over time. All of these races have been evolving all this time beyond their origins with a lot of gene flow back and forth. It’s enormously complex!

One thing that just recently occurred to me is that the social race which can make an Indian into a mestizo works the other way around too. A white or near white Latino can be made into a mestizo as well.

Not as likely to happen IN Latin America, but more likely here by left-leaning Latinos that want to ethnically distance themselves from Anglo whites. For example, me and a friend of mine, an essentially white Costa Rican were having a discussion about this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5lk_gg3Vq8 and how commercials reinforce ethnic stereotypes. I said that those two Hispanic women were essentially white themselves. Maybe not Nordic white like what you’d see in Finland, but either of them could pass for Italian or Argentine with no problem. My friend told me they are “clearly not white.” They may not be seen as white in America because Americans tend to have a peculiar understanding of race and culture. Where someone with one drop of black blood is black even though they look white, and I guess a Hispanic with a drop of Indian blood is non-white as well. Interestingly, minorities have adopted this view themselves and embraced it. Funny thing is, it’s the reverse in Latin America. People there are mostly caught up on wanting to be white, at least in looks. If those two women were in Brazil, they wouldn’t be caught dead claiming to be anything BUT white. I’m not sure what the reason for this reversal in attitude is. I have to ponder it some more.

we dont have to be full blooded indians. regardless if we are 5% or 95% indian we still have indiginous aboriginal blood. and I speak for all indiginous peoples( mesoamericans, native americans and firstnation people) “this is our land” just because it was “legal” to you white folks just to take what you want dont mean shit. and on top of that we aint white for the simple reason that if a race war broke out today, us niggas, spicks, wetbacks and whatever else racist individuals would call would be enemies to white supremist groups and that includes us mestizos and mullatos.(mixed bloods) so there for we could never be white even if we wanted to be… AND WE DONT WANT TO BE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Robert,
After reading your article about the racial make-up of Mexican Americans I decided to get a DNA test. My results: 77% European, 21% Native American and 2% Black. It blew my mind, I always thought I was more Native American.

Even in the absence of scientific testing, it’s amazing to note the wide “variety” of ethnic physiognomies to be witnessed in a place like Los Angeles. Even in hardcore groups of Spanish-speaking East LA, Mexicans, you’ll see an abundance of Euro-traits that the Mexicans overlook happily in the pursuit of Chicano “purity.” Light eyes, light skin, narrow features, height, all over, man. I consider myself pretty mestizo-looking, but even in my case I have very pale skin, something present in many most of my maternal line, and while I don’t share it, much of my paternal line I’ve noted has a lighter shade of eye colors. My parental lines stem from the northern areas of Monterrey and Zacatecas, so I don’t doubt that there is a strong Europrescence in my bloodline.

However. I don’t particularly identify with any of this Aztlan bullshit, nor do I take any “pride” in my European roots. I like to think the concept of hybrid vigor points to a group of people bolstered by the negation of White and Native weaknesses. This is why the Mexican people should be proud…because they are blend of two strong groups,and that we are the result of a union of these. But we ultimately seem intent on living down to a sense of hybrid nihilism instead.

Well you know what the Frontiersmen used to say about half-breeds, products of Indian squaws and White “squaw-men”: “They have the worst qualities of both races!”

So much for hybrid vigor.

While I believe that in many cases, you can get all of the good of each race and none of the bad, it’s perfectly possible for the opposite to occur also.

We have tons of really cool mostly Mexican Hispanic phenotypes in my town. I marvel at them all day, every day. What’s odd is that at some point, the phenotypes start reproducing themselves a bit. For instance, you see a woman at the Walmart who reminds you of the woman at the bank and so on. The founding pools were relatively small: Mexican Amerindians + Spaniard European Caucasoids. Sure there were other inputs, but that’s it for the most part. At some point, you probably run out of phenotypes and you start seeing some reproduction of features.

Isn’t that the truth. There is a popular conception that AsianxWhite always equals this really fantastic hybrid race of beautiful women. Frequently this is true, but I’ve seen many instances of AsianxWhite offspring that were pretty hideous. The tendency toward physical repulsiveness drowns out most other racial tendencies. In other words, ugly is everywhere.

I think what pisses me off about Mexican nationalists is their ignorance, perhaps blindness, or perhaps denial, to the fact that Indian purity really doesn’t count for much except drunkenness and useless architecture.

Very interesting article, Rob. I really liked it. I am Mexican both born and raised most of my life in a middle class area of Mexico City, and the Atlaniztas for me are fools. The past is the past, we have to move on and work on the country’s future.

I also took a DNA test, and I came out: 68% European, 30% Native American and 2% Black. I agree with the test result as most of my family have either full or predominantly Caucasian appearance though my maternal great-grandmother was mostly indigenous and this genetic result is the average score for a middle class person in Latin America. I consider myself an Euro-mestizo btw.

My genotype is the average of a Northern Mexican or a Chilean for that matter since both have similar admixtures.

Haha, thanks Rob. My score from what I have read is also the average make-up of Northern Mexicans, Chileans and middle class Latin Americans in Latin America according to many genetic studies. In other words, all three groups are on average Euro-mestizos.

Also, most Chicanos (especially from the SW USA), have ancestors from Northern Mexico, which on average have 60% or more Caucasian admixture in their genetic make-up and phenotype.

Central Mexico on average is 50/50 whilst Southern Mexico has the same as Northern Mexico in score but switch the Caucasian component into the Amerindian component as being the predominant.